With racist violence and murder escalating and the nation well-past its crisis point, the looming midterm election is an eleventh hour opportunity to turn this mess around. Willie Nelson got involved during election season to cut a song with a clear message: “Vote ‘Em Out.” The legendary outlaw country star knows where he stands on national issues like immigration policy and gun safety: At home in Texas, he’s supporting Beto O’Rourke for Senate in the statewide race against Ted Cruz. We can’t all write songs and reach hearts and minds like Nelson can at a rally or with a tune, but we can all be effective in our homes and workplaces. We can take time in the next week to canvass or phone bank for the candidates and issues we support. We can speak out when the people we know, including friends and family, try to defend or ignore the racist/sexist sickness that has infected the highest elected and appointed officials in the land. And on November 6, we will cast our votes: It remains a tool to counteract the hate with nonviolence, or as Willie sings it, “The biggest gun we’ve got is called the ballot box.”

Last Saturday on Balmy Alley, a street entirely devoted to local mural art in San Francisco’s Mission District, the latest work to grace the backside of a building on the block-long street was finally unveiled: Women of the Resistance was conceived and painted by a collective of women artists, many of them local to the neighborhood and trained at the San Francisco Art Institute. I had the opportunity to speak to three of the painters, Lucía Gonzalez-Ippolito, Fernanda Parker Vizcaino and Michelle Williams, and to learn the story of how they chose the 38 women of the resistance to paint into the mural. Pictured here is the mural just before the unveiling and blessing ceremony, but you can read my interview and to see photos by the Aperturist of the mural in all of its full color glory at CurrentSF.

One of the central figures in the mural is Judy Brady, a local activist I was acquainted with from my own work in the district. Brady was known to locals for her participation in neighborhood demonstrations, particularly those against the tech buses which block the way for school children and people with disabilities, of which she was one. But what most people didn’t know about Judy, otherwise known as the terse, silver-haired lady in the motorized scooter, was that she was a pioneering feminist and one of the first writers for Ms. Magazine: Her essay “Why I Want a Wife,” published in 1970 is still used in women’s studies courses to this day. Had I known this about Judy, we would’ve enjoyed talking more than we did, I’m sure. As it was, we brushed past each other regularly in the bookshop where I worked, we spoke just a few times and briefly: The bookstore closed in 2016 and Judy died the following year. Writing about this mural, I learned that there are everyday women of the resistance in our midst: I wish I’d had a chance to thank Judy for all that she did for us. Read the entire article now:

The legendary Detroit rock ‘n’ roll band MC5 was always a bit of a hard sell for me: You just don’t have the right rock critic and fan credentials if you don’t bow down to the band and well, I frankly didn’t always hear it or have it in me to do that. Showmanship, yes. Sheer raw power, without a doubt. And a story that’s something else: Political to be sure, and sometimes problematic, but it’s fueled by a love of jazz and freedom and well, they kinda had me after that.

Wayne Kramer led the band through the early Detroit scene, back when they could manage mostly blues and R&B-based covers; eventually they graduated to grinding originals (you’ve probably heard their signature song, “Kick Out The Jams”). Kramer loved straight up Chuck Berry as well as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and other avant garde music and the band attempted to merge roots rock guitar with the freedom of far out jazz. When the band joined forces with a local jazz writer, John Sinclair, things started to stir: “The MC5 grew from a unique period of social, political and musical upheaval and created a sound that reverberated through their city with resonances throughout the counter cultural movement,” is how I put it in Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music From Blues to Hip Hop. In the course of writing that book, I spoke with Kramer about his life and times with the band and their political involvements, including all that came before and after their appearance at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. Since that interview, he’s written his own memoir, The Hard Stuff, much of it concerning his drug addiction, his prison time behind that addiction, and of course his time with the band (which sounds a little a sentence of its own variety).

Further thoughts on the MC5, Kramer and his work as a contemporary prison activist are what’s on the page in this month’s edition of my column for Tourworthy. I hope you’ll click through and have a look at it, and as ever, thanks for reading.

All around the country, bronze statues are coming down, thanks to a movement started in the South in 2015 following the church shooting in Charleston. A city, a whole region, holding on to a vision of the past that was not very honorable in the first place is no way to acknowledge true history or let the generations of people who were harmed by that history heal; instead these megaton renderings glorify injustice and beget more violence. A nation in the middle of a prolonged racial crisis can no longer continue to inflict harm on its citizens and yet, these statues are a daily reminder of how twisted, inaccurate, and dated our history has become. It’s time for a change.

The movement to unpack and teach a more accurate version of our state’s history has finally reached the far west, where we of course are supposed to understand and know better (yet by and large, I’m sad to report, there are those who still don’t get it). Here in San Francisco last week, Native American activists and their allies achieved a victory that was 30 years in the making: The rendering of a piece called Early Days depicting a Spanish conquistador and a Franciscan missionary lording over a Plains Indian (who by the way, was not from this region), was finally removed at the break of dawn following a contentious hearing process. I talked about statuary and other civic concerns with San Francisco’s poet laureate, Kim Shuck, a member of the Cherokee nation as well as a Polish American and a native to San Francisco. She’s an educator with a masters in fine art and knows well the precedents for public art display; as a Native American, a person of conscience, and a mother, she was personally aggrieved by the sight of the statue as she moved in and out of the public library, her primary place of work as our city’s poet laureate. And we talked more in-depth about the battle to topple the statue and about her San Francisco life. I hope you’ll read on and link to this week’s edition of my San Francisco Examiner column, S.F. Lives: READ NOW

Photo of Irwin Swirnoff by Kevin Hume, courtesy of The San Francisco Examiner

My Sunday Examiner column S.F. Lives, continues to chronicle the comings and goings of people I’ve determined to be of The City, Franciscan or how we say, Frisco Kids. This week’s subject, Professor Irwin Swirnoff, and his story of multiple displacements that’s culminating in a job search and possible relocation away from the Bay Area really hit close to home for me. Irwin and I share many of the same interests, from broadcasting, DJ-ing and interviewing to a love of books, records, and films. We’ve crossed paths at various cultural institutions and alternative retail outlets in town and we’re interested in the history of the arts here, as well as in preserving and passing on the underground esthetic we gravitated to and continue to develop via our respective crafts (he’s a filmmaker). I have no doubt he’ll land exactly where he needs to, and that his outcome will be better and more beautiful than anything we could predict for him, but if you have a moment, send a shout-out to the universe, launch a flare and say a little prayer for Irwin and the artists like him who’ve made The City’s reputation sparkle and shine, far beyond our seven super-square miles and western horizon.

Today marks the 55th anniversary of the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Among those assembled to help Dr. King push forward his dream of racial harmony and economic justice was Len Chandler (often overlooked in the history of civil rights work), one of the voices in a trio that day which included Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (he appears at about 17 minutes into the following clip, though the whole 25 minutes is worth your time).

Chandler would march with Dr. King and travel throughout the South in the name of voter registration, informing rural Southerners of their polling rights, often at great risk to his own life. His poems were recognized by Langston Hughes, he wrote the folk standard “Green, Green Rocky Road” with poet Bob Kaufman, and recorded two albums for Colombia Records, but little is known about him or his life. I sought him out when I wrote Keep on Pushing, my text that tracks the origins and evolution of freedom music, and its roots in African American resistance and liberation movement: a fraction of what we discussed was included in the book. I remain curious why seven years after publication, few scholars have pursued the lead and why so little is known about him…

Originally from Akron, Ohio, and studying on scholarship at Columbia in the ’50s, Chandler made his way to Greenwich Village folk music by accident: Lured to the sounds of Washington Square Park by the downtown youths he was mentoring, he easily fell into the scene based on his natural ear for songwriting and his familiarity with the songs of Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, and Woody Guthrie. Following a performance at the popular Village coffeehouse, the Gaslight Cafe, Chandler landed a contract to go to Detroit, writing and performing topical songs for local television. A few months later, when he returned to New York, the folk thing was in full swing: Bob Dylan was the latest arrival to town and the pair started to trade ideas and songs.

“I hadn’t yet begun writing streams of songs like I would, but Len was, and everything around us looked absurd—there was a certain consciousness of madness at work,” wrote Dylan in his book Chronicles. Chandler remembers it like this in Keep on Pushing: “The first song I ever heard of Dylan’s was ‘Hey ho, Lead Belly, I just want to sing your name,’ stuff like that.” Dylan used Chandler’s melody for his song, “The Death of Emmett Till.” “Len didn’t seem to mind,” Dylan wrote (today, as it happens, is the anniversary of the murder of Emmett Till).

Chandler went on to record two albums for Columbia: To Be a Man and The Loving People. He continued to work as a topical songwriter, a peace and civil rights advocate, and as a songwriting teacher; his tour of Pacific Rim bases with Donald Sutherland, Jane Fonda, Holly Near and Paul Mooney was documented in the Francine Parker film, FTA, a must-see for anyone interested in US history and anti-war efforts within military ranks.Catch a glimpse of Chandler at the end of this trailer for the film:

It was an extreme privilege (and I have since found out a rare opportunity) to meet one of the true unsung heroes of singing activism (as well as his wife Olga James, a pioneering performer in her own right), and have him tell his story to me. Though largely retired from performing, he remains well- informed on human rights, politics, and the arts and will step up and step out for civil rights. You can read a portion of our talks in Keep on Pushing, and someday I will post the complete unedited transcripts, though for now, enjoy the voice of Chandler from back in the day, when singing was a huge part of moving the movement forward.

Bob Bob Dylan’s 1971 single, “George Jackson,” a remembrance for the radicalized convict and Black Panther who died in a San Quentin prison shoot-out on August 21, 1971, remains one of his most mysterious recordings. Not only does “George Jackson” mark the songwriter’s return to topical song form and to touring after a long hiatus, his subject remains as misunderstood to a general audience as does the singer and his songs.

Less than a month after the prison shooting in California, a historic event at Attica Correctional Facility wherein prisoners took control of the prison to protest its poor conditions resulted in more fatalities—an unmistakable call for prison reform. Perhaps it was that call to which Dylan was responding when in November, he cut and released “George Jackson,” a 45-rpm record that reached the Top 40 in January of 1972.

Opening with the blues trope, “I woke up this morning,” Dylan’s “George Jackson” is not a typical blues song, though it surely addresses the larger topic of racial and socio-economic oppression from which a certain style of blues was born. It also leaves a record of Jackson and his story.

“The power of George Jackson’s personal story remains painfully relevant to our nation today, with its persistent racism, its hellish prisons, its unjust judicial system, and the poles of wealth and poverty that are at the root of all that,” wrote historian Howard Zinn in an updated version of Jackson’s Soledad Brother. Wresting larger truths from the events of 1971, Dylan delivered his summation in these often quoted lines from “George Jackson”

Sometimes I think this whole world Is one big prison yard Some of us are prisoners The rest of us are guards

Dylan cut two versions of “George Jackson” for a double sided seven-inch: A “big band” version featuring Kenny Buttrey (drums), Ben Keith (steel guitar), and Leon Russell (bass), and a solo acoustic version. Among the various issues of the single—and there are many—is a picture sleeve with an image of Dylan performing at the Concert for Bangladesh (pictured above, it remains sought-after by record collectors). Here’s a version of Dylan’s song recorded by reggae band, Steel Pulse:

The details of the Jackson case are still debated today by scholars, historians, and those who remember the events. As the story goes, it was a 70-dollar robbery that landed Jackson in state prison, his sentence indeterminate. Guards took an instant dislike to Jackson on the inside and his sentences were extended following events occurring at Soledad State Prison in which three Black inmates and a white guard were killed. Using his time in solitary to educate himself, Jackson studied psychologist Franz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), Marx, and Mao, and came to understand the incarceration of poor Blacks for petty crime in a political context. A leader in moving prisoners to radicalize, Jackson joined the Black Panthers and became one of the group’s most celebrated members, despite J. Edgar Hoover’s declaration in 1969 that the Black Panthers were public enemy number one.

Published in 1971, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, was greeted with a positive reception by intellectuals and political progressives. That Jackson had been framed for conspiring to kill a guard in the Soledad incident was a widely held belief; his defenders were vocal and his case was a cause célèbre. But a few days before the Jackson trial was to begin, a riot broke out in San Quentin in which inmates and guards were again slain and Jackson was among those killed as he ran across the yard in an alleged escape attempt. In 2015, Hugo Pinell, the last incarcerated member of the San Quentin Six, was killed while serving his life sentence, much of it in solitary confinement.

The following is a live recording of Joan Baez singing “George Jackson.”

Japanese composer, pianist, and electronic music innovator, Ryuichi Sakamoto, has had a celebrated career, to be sure, though the new documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda, is less about his personal biography and high achievement and more about his process, what drives him, and what he hopes to leave behind.

The film, directed by Stephen Nomura Schible in quiet, understated style that echoes his subject, begins with Sakamoto exploring the aftermath at Fukushima. At times dressed in full hazmat gear, he checks out the landscape for any remaining sounds of life and discovers he likes the tuning of a piano that was damaged and washed ashore, post-tsunami.

Through the course of the film, intimate discussion between filmmaker and composer reveal the genesis of Sakamoto’s initial interest in environmental concerns; he likens his ’90s awakening to climate change to a kind of knowing or vision common to artists. The story also asserts Sakamoto’s longtime interest in the rub between the natural world and the industrialized, high-tech tools of his trade, the latter popularized and pioneered by his own Yellow Magic Orchestra. Since the ’90s, he’s composed several pieces inspired by communing with the natural world: his soundscapes are more fully informed by it than one might realize upon casual listening (and there is audio and visual documentation of the process on offer in the film). And then there’s the cancer that gripped him in recent years and the challenges of navigating his condition alongside the complicated business of maintaining vitality over decades as an artist.

In one sample sequence, he is thrilled to have received a call from Alejandro González Iñárritu — one of his favorite directors — asking for a score to The Revenant; Sakamoto can’t contain his urge to get back to work, despite the demands on his health. And while the archival footage of him as a young performer/composer/actor and conductor underscores the impressive breadth of his career and his ability to have it all, the soul of the film rests in his Sakamoto’s creative flow in the face of his own mortality and the illness of planet earth, whether war or nuclear disaster. Despite the grim forecast, the musician not only manages to find joy, but delight in the act of creation, whether found in the natural world or in his own sound designs. His pleasure at discovering a new pop, squeak or jangle is ably captured on screen every time, and every time, it appears just as genuine and new to Sakamoto as the discovery before it.

The Coda in the movie’s subtitle seems to imply this may be the beginning of the final act in Sakamoto’s unique and esteemed career, yet it’s also the perfect introduction to his influential life in art and activism. And while this career-spanning summation with its unique focus zeroes-in on the art-making that’s ultimately the meat of any artist’s life, it may also serve as a prayer for Sakamoto to continue his work, for as long as it takes to get it done.

Readers of Keep on Pushing, published in the Summer of 2011, may remember I briefly noted The Coup as hip hop artists who use ideas and art to make change. When I was writing the book over a five-year-period mid-decade, times were such in post-9/11 USA that “political music” was annexed to the sidelines, largely unheard by the mainstream. “Movement building” was something to be considered a leftover idea from another dimension. Things have changed: Now even your grandma is woke (though chances are your other grandma and maybe even your ma or pa are among the third of folks still living in American dreamland, the one that still doesn’t/never did exist).

Before a handful of musicians rallied behind the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, and decades before the current moment of resistance, there was Boots Riley.

Born into the movement in Oakland, California, Riley was politicized from the gate. Since the early ‘90s he’s used his innate talent and acquired knowledge to make change as a community worker and as a hip hop artist, leading The Coup. The activist and auteur’s latest project, is the film he wrote and directed, Sorry to Bother You. It’s an important surreal and absurd social satire, at once entertaining and disturbing (because it hits so close to home, which is also one of its strengths).

Riley, who studied film at university, also understands the wages of capitalism and the politics of labor and the economy; the lyrics he spit with the Coup were loaded with often cinematic displays of the details of his interests. For this month’s column, I delivered a sweeping overview of his band’s catalog as a sort of prelude to the film: I hope every working American will see it.

Since the first of this year, it’s been my great pleasure to write a column for the Sunday San Francisco Examiner in which I introduce readers to some of the everyday citizens here who make our city a better place under difficult circumstances. Yep, I said it: For the last couple of years, you’ve probably been hearing about what some of us politely call “the changes” and what one of my favorite artist/activists calls the problem of gentrif-c-ation. Despite the pressures of living in the city with the highest cost of living in the United States, if we’re lucky (and I am) we’re making it with some help, some compassion and on the wings and the prayers of our best and brightest residents. I hope you’ll read the latest published stories in our ongoing series of profiles: On artist Marco Razo, poet and movement worker, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Cherokee broadcaster, Mary Jean Robertson, Japantown preservationist Karen Kai, and public health advocate Mike Shriver and let me know what you think. This Sunday we’ll be featuring the super-charged electrical contractor, Hanson Lee. Oh, and I get to collaborate with a great photographer, too: Here’s a snap I took of Kevin Hume at work photographing Karen Kai. Thanks for reading!